ULTIMATEZION

OPERATOR PROFILE // CLEARANCE: PUBLIC

Paul Halton

Platform & Solutions Architect · Engineering Leader

25+ years designing, building and running platforms that handle massive scale, stay secure and keep serving when things go wrong.

What I do

I'm a platform and solutions architect who also leads the teams that build and run what gets designed. I've architected systems end to end, from the data layer and traffic routing to the internal platforms engineers ship on, and taken them into production at massive scale.

Before my current role I spent 18 years at Rithum (CommerceHub / ChannelAdvisor), growing from Senior Systems Engineer to Director of Platform Engineering. There I owned the architecture and operation of large-scale commerce platforms across AWS, Azure and hybrid estates, and led teams spanning AI Platforms, Platform Software Services, DevEx, SRE, FinOps, Auth, Transfer Services, Infrastructure and Networking.

Track record

  • Platform and solutions architect at enterprise scale: owned standards, design decisions and cross-team technical direction across hybrid cloud, platform services and AI infrastructure.
  • AI and agentic platforms: built MCP services, agent runtime, LLM scaling and AI observability foundations for safe, governed AI adoption.
  • Cloud financial governance: owned AWS and Azure budget governance and delivered multi-million-dollar cost optimisation without slowing engineering down.
  • Reliability: established SLO frameworks and incident response standards; built an on-call culture that reduced MTTR.
  • Regulated environments: ran infrastructure for critical banking systems where availability and compliance weren't optional.

How I build

  • Built for scale. Architectures proven under real production load, designed to grow without re-engineering.
  • Secure by design. Least privilege, zero-trust defaults and policy as code, built in from the start instead of bolted on.
  • Resilient by default. Regionless HA/DR, automated failover and recovery that has actually been tested.
  • Cost-aware. FinOps discipline so that scale and resilience don't mean runaway spend.
  • Built for the people using it. Developer experience and golden paths that teams choose to use.

What I write about

  • Platform and solutions architecture
  • Security, cloud governance and FinOps
  • Regionless high availability and disaster recovery
  • AI platform strategy, including MCP and governed agent tooling

Career

  1. NowEngineering Leader, Platform & Intelligence
  2. 2025–2026Director, Platform Engineering AI Platforms · Agentic DevEx · FinOps · Infrastructure — Rithum
  3. 2021–2025Senior Manager, Platform Engineering Rithum
  4. 2017–2021Manager, System Operations Rithum
  5. 2008–2017Senior Systems Engineer Rithum
  6. 2001–2008Senior Infrastructure Engineer Anglo Irish Bank
  7. 1996–2001BSc Computer Applications Dublin City University

Stack

AWSAzureKubernetesTerraformHybrid cloudMCPLLM OpsAgent runtimeAI observabilityBackstageGitHub ActionsArgoCDDatadogPrometheusGrafanaSLOsAWS Cost ExplorerCloudHealth

Industries: e-commerce and marketplace technology, financial services and banking, enterprise SaaS.

Based in Co. Kerry, Ireland. Opinions are my own. Connect on LinkedIn ▸